Minisites Have Their Uses

Web Sites for larger schools can be a huge challenge for web developers and the school’s marketing or admissions department. The sheer size of these sites can sometimes make maintaining good usability very difficult. If your school’s web site has become a usability nightmare, a minisite may have its uses depending on your marketing strategy.

Searching around on the web I found a few that seemed to work well. McMurry University has a pretty good minisite for their school . A local art school, Kansas City Art Institute also has a good one [WJ2] [WJ2]. Both are smaller with better usability and can make navigating around the site a little simpler than their respective ‘large’ sites with hundreds, even thousands of pages.

When to Hold Them, When to Fold Them

These can be great landing pages for ads, and other direct marketing. These sites can also do well for SEO. The key to making these sites perform well in SEO is to link out to them from your main school web site, which shows they are working together to produce one great product for users.

These sites, however, should not be a school’s primary SEO focus, but can be a good marketing supplement to the main site. As always, make sure your primary school web site is well optimized before trying to boost the SEO performance of a minisite.

The key is to have a good online presence on the web, and a minisite can help with that, as long as a proper online marketing strategy is implemented.